Chapter 1
1. Contrast efficiency and effectiveness. Give an example of a time when an organization was effective but not efficient, efficient but not effective, both efficient and effective, and neither efficient nor effective.
2. What are the four basic activities that comprise the man- agement process? How are they related to one another?
3. Briefly describe the seven basic managerial skills. Give an example of each.
Chapter 2
1. Briefly describe the principles of scientific management and administrative management. What assumptions are made about workers?
2. What are the differences between the contingency and the universal perspectives on management? How is the contingency perspective useful in the practice of man- agement today?
3. Describe the systems perspective. Why is a business or- ganization considered an open system?
Chapter 3
l. Considerthethreeenvironmentsofafirm.Whichof the environments has the most direct and immediate im- pact on the firm? Which of the environments has a more diffuse and delayed impact? Explain.
2. Describe the organization's general environment. For each dimension, give at least one specificexample, other than the examples mentioned in your text.
3. What is diversity? Why is it increasing?
1 2 PART 1 Introducing Management "No one wants to be handed a list from their manager of all the ways they'll inevitably fail." -ELAINE WHERRY, CO-FOUNDER OF MEEBO Although she has just a little over fourteen years of management experience under her belt, Elaine Wherry is confident that there's one thing she can teach people about the business of managing a business: MANAGERS MAKE MISTAKES.1 Mistakes, as Wherry is quick to point out, come with the territory, especially when the territory that you want to conquer is unfamiliar, whether the wide-open spaces of a brand-new company or the well-defended plot of higher ground occupied by upper-level man- agement. "Everyone," she says, "has to go through the same rites of passage," but "you recover more quickly" when you admit and reflect upon your mis- takes. Wherry's specialty is reflecting upon mistakes. In fact, she's made a second career out of reflecting publicly on her own. In 2005, twenty-something Wherry, who entered Stanford University as a music major and emerged with a degree in symbolic systems, got together with two friends to start up Meebo, a social media platform designed to provide instant messaging to such major network services as Google, Yahoo! Messenger, and Facebook. Like many start-up creators, Wherry soon found herself taking on a variety of jobs, most of which she had to design, develop, and define as she went along. As she moved herself up the company ladder, from code writer to manager, to director, to VP of prod- ucts and then chief experience officer, Wherry gained first-hand experience at making a broad range of the kinds of mistakes that upwardly mobile managers tend to make. By 2012, she was on the CBS Morning Show explaining how and why she'd kept track of them in a diary in which she dutifully made entries for six years: "I was a typical first-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur," she admitted. "I had no significant managerial experi- ence, and of course I made a ton of mistakes. And so I'd find myself awake at 2:00 or 3:00a.m., agonizing over the mistakes that I'd made in the daytime .... I wanted Meebo offers chat room seNices that companies can embed in their web pages. Elaine Wherry, co-founder of Meebo and shown here on the left, has a lot of practical advice for future managers. to be able to reflect on them later so I wouldn't beat myself up during the week. It was also a way to get more sleep ." The real value of Wherry's combination of sleep therapy and self-improvement became apparent when she started hiring and managing new employ- ees: " I realized that, being in the unique role of a founder, I was changing hats every six months, and when I started hiring team members to fill my shoes, I saw them make the exact same mistakes that I did." When Wherry tried to deal with the situation, the first thing she did was make a mistake. "At first, I tried giving new managers and directors my bulleted list. However, that was horribly ineffective. No one wants to be handed a list from their manager of all the ways they'll inevitably fail." After reflecting on her mistake, Wherry hit upon the idea of imparting her experience through stories: " I started focusing on telling stories and setting the scenes for these mistakes. I sketched the scenes of all of the mistakes and started weaving them into a story that showed the professional journey that everyone makes from her first day on the job as a fresh grad to leading the company as a C-leve I executive ." Not surprisingly, Wherry found herself a suitable subject for many of her stories-" the first time I had to scrap a project I loved," for example, "or interviewing disaster stories." In 2012, as Meebo was being sold to Google for a reported $100 million, Wherry left the company. The next year, she included a "1 00 Mistakes" feature in her blog at www.ewherry.com, adding whimsical little drawings to underscore the key points made by brief scenarios. " Most mistakes," she says, "happen from good intentions gone astray, lingering habits from previous roles, or not knowing your responsibilities." So what's a good example of a noteworthy mis- take? "Lunch-time conversations," suggests Wherry. "Maybe it's been a frustrating morning, you 're sur- rounded by coworkers, and it's really tempting to say th ings like, 'I can't believe the company thinks it's going to hit this goal! ' Managers don 't realize how destructive those conversations really are. The underlying sentiment of a lot of those conversations is, 'Corporate management is clueless."' The moral of the story? DON'T VENT IN PUBLIC PLACES, which is closely related to IT'S NOT A DEMOCRACY CHAPTER 1 Managing and the Manager's Job 3 AND YOU'RE NOT A PAL and DELEGATE AND HOLD YOUR TEAM RESPONSIBLE. For example, Wherry illus- trates a relevant story about a new manager at a com- pany like Meebo. Six drawings are accompanied by the following six captions: 1. You 're ready. Bring it on! You 're going to do anything you can to get an A+ and change the world! 2. But what's this? Your codebase and design has hacks. 3. So you send an email to everyone in the company proposing a redesign that scales to billions of people. 3:17am To: All From: You It's come to my attention that we write hacky code. I don't know if that's because you're inept or just lazy. Here's my grand plan to make it perfect. -XOXO 4. But no one is participating. Your meetings feel like you're pulling teeth . 5. Meanwhile, as a manager, you've tried every- thing-promising go-karts, vacations, parties, beer. Why can't your team deliver? 6. Fine. You 'll just have to dig in and do it yourself.* Wherry has talked about turning "100 Mistakes" into a book, but she's currently busy giving presenta- tions to management and entrepreneurship groups. To demonstrate what she means by telling stories, she relies on narrative as the format of her presentations. Each story consists of original cartoons, usually illustrat- ing a frustra-t_ed manager's state of mind, and concludes with Wherry asking participants what mistakes they caught. She's now writing a graphic novel about leadership. *What's t he biggest mistake in this scenario? See You Make the Ca ll, question 2 (p. 31). 4 PART 1 Introducing Management organization A group of people working together in structured and coordinated fashion to achieve a set of goals Elaine Wherry is clearly a manager. So, too, are Phil Knight (chairman of Nike), Ursula Burns (CEO ofXerox), Osamu Kojima (chairman ofMitsubishi ), eil MacGregor (direc- tor of the British Museum), Richard Hayne (president and chairman of Urban Outfitters), Jerry Jones (owner and general manager Dallas Cowboys football team), Benedict XVI (pope of the Roman Catholic Church), and Fadi and Hege Kalaouze (co-presidents of Aggieland Outfitters in College Station, Texas). As diverse as they and their organizations are , all of these managers are confronted by many of the same challenges, strive to achieve many of the same goals, and apply many of the same concepts of effective management in their work. For better or worse, our society is strongly influenced by managers and their organiza- tions . Most people in the United States are born in a hospital (an organization), educated by public or private schools (all organizations), depend on organizations for their income, and buy virtually all of their consumable products and services from businesses (organizations). And much of our behavior is influenced by various government agencies (also organizations). We define an organization as a group of people working together in a structured and coordi- nated fashion to achieve a set of goals. The goals may include profit (Starbucks Corporation), the discovery ofknowledge (University of Missouri), national defense (the U.S . Army), coor- dination of various local charities (United Way of America), or social satisfaction (a sorority). Because organizations play such major roles in our lives, understanding how they operate and how they are managed is important. This book is about managers and the work they do. In Chapter 1, we examine the gen- eral nature of management, its dimensions, and its challenges. We explain the concepts of management and managers, discuss the management process, present an overview of the book, and identify various kinds of managers. We describe the different roles and skills of managers, discuss the nature of managerial work, and examine the scope of management in contemporary organizations. In Chapter 2, we describe how both the practice and the theory of management have evolved. As a unit, then, these first two chapters provide an introduction to the field by introducing both contemporary and historical perspectives on management. An Introduction to Management Although defining the term organization is relatively simple, the concept of management is a bit more elusive. It is perhaps best understood from a resource-based perspective. As we discuss more completely in Chapter 2, all organizations use four basic kinds of resources from their environment: human, financial, physical, and information. Human resources include managerial talent and labor. Financial resources are the capital used by the organization to finance both ongoing and long-term operations. Physical resources include raw materials, office and production facilities , and equipment. Information resources are usable data needed to make effective decisions. Examples of resources used in four very different kinds of organiza- tions are shown in Table 1.1. § Managers are responsible for combining and coor- ij dinating these various resources to achieve the organiza- ~ £J tion's goals. A manager at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, for Workers negotiate the transport of a company's physical resources. They are moving drilling equipment to another site in order to maximize profits for the entire